Category Archives: R.I.P.

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The personnel for Elton John’s breakthrough album. Paul Buckmaster second from the left.

Strange and disorienting serendipity because this Child of the Seventies is just now–literally this week–catching up to Elton John’s first five albums, where Paul Buckmaster was an insistent and insidious presence.

Buckmaster–classically trained instrumentalist, composer, conductor and ace arranger–was the definer of Orchestral Rock for Modern Ears. In other hands, that would almost certainly would have been a dubious distinction. On some of those Elton John records it was a dubious distinction.

But his fingers were on (usually all over) a number of wonderful era-defining records in the early seventies: “Space Oddity,” “You’re So Vain,” “Without You,” Terrapin Station, numerous projects that involved him working with everyone from John (for whom he arranged the breakthrough hit “Your Song,” and “Tiny Dancer,” the closest Sir Elton ever came to a statement of balladeering purpose and one that has grown with the years) to Leonard Cohen to Blood, Sweat and Tears to Miles Davis.

It may not be a coincidence that Carly Simon, Harry Nillson, Elton John and Mick Jagger all waxed tracks that were contenders for their finest vocals when Buckmaster was handing them arrangements that begged for something more than they themselves may have thought they could deliver.

Which brings us to this, the greatest album closer in the history of Rock and Roll if only because it closed so much more than an album…and ushered in a New Age where all concerned would be subsumed….Including, just today, Paul Buckmaster.

Him and God should be having a very interesting talk about now. I’m rooting for a better understanding.

Australian rock and roll wasn’t really a thing until George Young and his fellow guitarist–and destined-to-be-musical-partner-for-life–Harry Vanda, wrote “Friday On My Mind” for their band the Easybeats. In the five decades since, Aussie rock and roll has never not been a thing, having been kept alive by many (including the vastly undersung Easybeats themselves) and at the forefront by Young’s younger brothers, who started a little band called AC/DC, for whom George produced the early albums that put them on the map.

His career had a theme, then, and that theme was Stomp. He was as much a pure rock and roller as Fats Domino, whose death, within twenty-four hours, was understandably bound to overshadow any but a fellow giant’s.

I can’t call George Young a giant–but he was an essential figure in the spread of rock and roll across the world and left behind a body of work us mere mortals can certainly envy.

People argue about the origins of Rock ‘n’ Roll and especially about the “first” Rock ‘n’ Roll record.

People have a thousand ways of making themselves stupid.

As music, culture or anything else that marked the moment when the future diverged from the past, Rock ‘n’ Roll–and, hence, Rock and Roll (think Elvis) and Rock (think Beatles)…and Anti-Rock (think Punk) and Post Rock (think Hip Hop)–began the first time Fats Domino’s left hand, a piano, and a recording microphone were in the same room all at once.

You can go back a whole lot further than the beginnings of the recording industry–and range much further afield than Rampart Street–and find elements of what became Rock ‘n’ Roll (and then all those other things). You can find them all over the timeline and all over the map.

But the train didn’t leave the station until Antoine Domino recorded “The Fat Man” and unleashed it on a half-suspecting, and perhaps more than half-expecting world.

And once the train left, there was no turning it back. When Elvis pulled a then nearly-forgotten Fats into the press conference kicking off his Vegas comeback and introduced him as “the real King of Rock and Roll” he was acknowledging the enormity of Domino’s influence, but also his status as the biggest R&B act of the formative fifties, the real “revolution.”

As the only fifties’ R&B star, in fact, bigger than Elvis.

Time had already forgotten what Elvis reminded everyone of in 1969 (when most of the press present had to be informed of who, exactly, this Fats Domino really was.)

Time forgot again in the long years since, reminded only on those rare occasions when Fats made national news–a presidential honor here, a Katrina-sized flood in the New Orleans neighborhood he increasingly refused to leave there.

Once his passing–today, at 89–leaves the front page, Time will forget again, even if it never stops patting its foot.

Some of the forgetting was his own doing. I never came across any written or video evidence of Fats promoting himself as the Originator. He left that to the likes of Richard and Chuck and Jerry Lee–and the ever-insidious crit-illuminati who listened to them, rather than to Elvis. Fats himself was more likely to shrug and say rock ‘n’ roll was just something they had been doing in New Orleans since forever.

Maybe.

But you can listen to “Blueberry Hill” being done by someone as great and visionary as Louis Armstrong and then listen to Fats, and decide that his humble take might be disputable.

You can also listen to a real New Orleans rock ‘n’ roll precursor like “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue” (perhaps Armstrong’s greatest rhythm record, from all the way back in the twenties) and reach the same conclusion.

Fats Domino was the man who, as singer, songwriter, ivory tickler, drove the Engine that rolled down the track until it couldn’t be stopped. It ended up running straight through the last–and best–cultural explosion “America” will ever know.

I said most of what I could say about Tom Petty–and the effect he had on those of us who thought Rock and Roll was still worth living for as the Frozen Silence (1980–2016…whatever the Godforsaken future holds, it won’t be Frozen or Silent) set in–here.

I’ll just add that he’s been strangely on my mind this past year though I couldn’t quite figure out how to approach writing about him at length. There were too many things to say that I couldn’t get my head around with the Frozen Silence being melted by a Fire Next Time that certainly shows no signs of burning out on the day I have to get my head around Tom Petty dying.

The one thing I knew I wanted to say, never mind the angle of approach, was that every single artist I listen to regularly has a place they take me to when I’m sitting in my den with the headphones on–a place that’s better suited to their music than any other on the American Highway.

Some folks sound just a little more perfect on real or imagined back country roads in the Southland, some on L.A. Freeways, some while running between the rusted out towns of the Upper Midwest, some in the Smoky Mountain Rain, some in the Philly Ghetto and so forth. I drove or rode through all those places and more back when I traveled around for the fun of it, and one thing I found is that a place’s perfect voice is not always who you think it will be.

The other thing I found was that Tom Petty and his band were the only ones who sounded perfect everywhere. Maybe being a Gainesville redneck who dreamed of L.A. because that’s where the Byrds were–and then ended up making it there–had something to do with it. Whatever the reason, nobody else operating in the middle of the Frozen Silence made as many records that rejected its terrifying, life-sapping assumptions so completely.

Robert Christgau once sneered that Petty’s “one great virtue” was “his total immersion in rock and roll.”

Sorry, but if you have to spend your life immersed in the idea of shouting into a Frozen Silence the Crit-Illuminati did every bit as much as the mere politicians to create and sustain (not least by remaining immersed in the fakery of pretending there were still sides worth choosing), what other virtue do you need?

Hope you’ve got that room at the top of the world tonight brother. Because you’re sure as hell the only damn Gator I want to see when I get there….

There’s always something a little wistful, and a shade pathetic, about a man who outlives his time. Hugh Hefner outlived his time so thoroughly that he lasted just long enough for his definitive cheesecake mag, Playboy, to leave off with the nudes.

Fitting, perhaps, for a man who reportedly cried when he finally accepted the reality that his nudes were going to have to show pubic hair in order to keep low rent thugs like Bob Guccione and Larry Flynt from driving him out of business in a Nightmare Age which, like many a wide-eyed revolutionary naif before him, he had ushered in all unknowing.

There were comebacks and comebacks and comebacks ever after. But I suspect it was never the same from that moment. By the time all the public hair was shaved anyway, I doubt he cared a whit. I never even heard if they caved on tattoos and body piercing after he let go full control.

Perhaps he never did either.

That said, his contributions in delivering generous helpings of jazz and late-sixties rock and roll to audiences who might not have experienced them otherwise (including, in the age of YouTube, people like me) shouldn’t be forgotten. Nor should the fact that, when he was in charge of taste-making, taste at least still existed.

That’s nothing we need worry about now, seven sex revolutions later. There’s no cheese and no cake. Pretty soon, no men or women either. Paradise surely awaits, right here on earth.

It may or may not be what he thought he wanted. But, either way, Hell will be living to see it.

Wherever he is now-and I suspect it’s getting a little warm–he was at least spared that….

I didn’t realize until I went down the YouTube rabbit hole after Don’s death was announced this week just who many of his songs I still knew by heart, or that he had provided the missing link between Jim Reeves and Randy Travis. He’s known to rock audiences (if at all) as a favorite of Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton (who had a hit with a cover of Williams’ best record, which neither he nor anyone else could hope to improve):

But everybody in country knew Don Williams’ worth, both as a songwriter and, especially, a warm, graceful stylist who both carried on and inspired traditions without ever being mistaken for anyone else.

His legacy was an indelible piece of what country used to be, almost in spite of itself….and what it will be no more, no matter how hard it tries.

But don’t let that fool you. In his own time or any other, nobody else wrote songs called “Good Ole Boys Like Me” and meant to invoke a world that assumed Hank and Tennessee Williams came from the same place, let alone carried it off without breaking a sweat. Charlie Daniels and Hank Jr. have their place and their uses. But Don Williams carved a niche for himself by being the Voice of Reason in the face of rage and resentment. The radio was better when he was on it and the world was better when he was in it.

Country music took a double hit today. I’ll try to gather some thoughts on the mellow giant, Don Williams, later on, but here I’ll note the passing of Troy Gentry, half of the duo Montgomery Gentry, who died in a helicopter crash in New Jersey this afternoon at the age of 50. I can’t say Montgomery Gentry were any big favorite of mine, but I wrote at length about their greatest record here.

And if you don’t feel like clicking over, this video–and vocal–by itself is good enough for any man’s epitaph.

Steely Dan were rock’s consummate pedants, the kind the music was liable to produce if it stayed around long enough–which, rock and roll being what it was, and Rock and Roll America being what it was–meant too good to be ignored.

In the world that came spinning out of the 50’s revolution (the real revolution college bound white boys were bound to take credit for sooner or later, even if they had to draft working class Brits for front men–at a certain point, anyone would do, as long as they weren’t blacks or hillbillies, it was only a fluke that the Beatles really were geniuses), even the pedants were better than anyone had a right to expect.

I never shared the thrill so many others bought when Walter Becker and his partner, Donald Fagen, started releasing their pointillist masterworks in the seventies. I loved a few of their records (the musical highlights of which–David Palmer’s haunted vocal on “Dirty Work,” Elliot Randall’s cascading guitar line on “Reelin’ in the Years,” Skunk Baxter’s stinging/healing licks on “Change of the Guard” and “Old School”–were provided by someone other than Becker and his partner, who soon turned exclusively to hired guns anyway), but, really, their entire essence was in their first album’s two lead cuts.

Not to say the essence didn’t have it’s merits–considerable even–but, despite all the accolades, the only thing that reached deeper than a mordant surface after the first album-and-a-half was a cover by the sort of group Steely Dan was meant to erase from history.

I can’t offer the kind of love Becker is getting elsewhere on the occasion of his passing (Terry Teachout called Becker and Fagen “the Stephen Sondheims of rock”…God love him, he meant it as a compliment).

I’m a fan of both men, but I don’t know enough about either to add anything to the deserved encomiums that will doubtless pour forth on the occasion of their passing within twenty-four hours of each other.

I can speak to what their deaths–like those of so many other icons of their generation–represent, which is the continuing drip-by-drip erosion of the common culture. No comedian working today, not even Jerry Seinfeld, will create a similar sense of loss if he/she passes thirty years from now, decades on from the height of their fame.

I can also say that this is related to why neither man would make it today.

Our current Paradise controls public thought so rigidly that Gregory’s sharp edges (“A southern liberal is one who hangs you from a low tree”) would be sanded away as the price of the ticket.

And, paradoxically, the degree of physical license we’ve granted ourselves in the place of thought would render Lewis’ style of anarchy simply confusing. Hell, it was pretty confusing even when there were limits for him to push against.

It matters not that neither man had commanded much of the public space for years and years. The blazing glory of their youth will live on as part of what the future remembers about us.